India (part III)

Even
out of doors, even in the full daylight, these forms are surrounded by a
mysterious obscurity. The torsos, the arms, the legs, and the heads
commingle—when a statue itself has not twenty arms, ten legs, four or five
faces, when it is not laden with all these aspects of tenderness and fury by
which life reveals itself. The depths of the sculpture undulate heavily, as if
to force back into the moving eternity of primitive matter the still unformed
beings that attempt to emerge from it. We see writhing larvae, vague embryos;
they seem incessant and successive attempts at gestation which start and
miscarry in the intoxication and fever of a soil that continually creates.

As one
views this sculpture from near by one must not attempt to find in it the
scientific modeling of the Egyptians or the philosophic modeling of Phidias,
although Egypt and, to a greater degree, the Greece brought in by Alexander,
profoundly influenced the first Buddhistic sculptors, perhaps even to the
extent of revealing them to themselves. Sculpture is no longer considered in
its planes and its passages, save summarily and by instinct. It might better be
defined in terms of painting, for in these gigantic bas-reliefs light and shade
play a vital and continuous part, as if a brush moved over them to soften and
caress them. But Hindu painting, itself, while preserving the qualities of
materiality that are in the sculpture, is perhaps more purified by the mind.
The painting is usually the work of the monks; Buddhism has left a clear
imprint on it. And later on it is especially in painting that, when Islam
arrives, the influence of Persia makes itself felt. From the great Buddhistic
decorations to the Mussulman miniatures, the spiritualization of the work
sometimes touches the rarest, the highest, the most human harmony. One may not
assign a place lower than that of the great classic works to the frescoes of
Ajunta, in which the lyrical pantheism of the Hindus seems to fuse, for an
hour, the spiritual radiance of Egyptian paintings and the moral intoxication
of the old Chinese artists. By a kind of ethnic paradox the great painting of
India would seem nearer to the linear rhythms, which are the chief
preoccupation of the Egyptian or Greek sculptors, than Hindu sculpture itself,
for the latter seeks to transfer to stone or metal the fleeting, flowing
modeling of the painter. When we compare this sculpture with that of the
anonymous workmen of Thebes or with that of the Athenian masters, we find
something in it that is absolutely new, that is difficult to define—something
like the obscure fermentation in a crucible, as compared with the limpidity of
a theorem. The modeling aims at movement rather than at form. It is never
considered in an isolated way nor in its abstract relationships with the
neighboring figures. Material passages unite the figures among themselves; they
are always heavy with atmosphere; the background is always felt; other figures
partly absorb them; the modeling is fluctuating and billowy, like the mass of
the leaves when labored by the wind. What models the rock, what rolls it into
storm waves, is desire and despair and enthusiasm. It undulates like a crowd
ravished by voluptuousness and fury. It swells and grows tense like the torso
of a woman as she feels the approach of love.

As we
have observed, it is the movement and not the form that interests the Indian
sculptor, and so we do not find him seeking harmonies of relationships or
clearly stated abstractions, but expressive masses which give an intoxicated,
florid image of the whole world, and no longer seek for an equilibrium between
the laws of the universe and the laws of the mind. By flashes, veiled by
obscurity and by torpor, one can doubtless find everything in this art,
overlapping the neighboring element, oppressing it or being oppressed by it;
one can meet with brief jets of consciousness and sudden starts from the most
rudimentary realism to the highest idealism. When one sees them isolated one
notes the special quality of the figures, especially the figures of women,
innumerable, gentle, religious, and yet formidable in their grace, their
sensuality, their carnal heaviness. At every moment they give evidence of the
effort—gigantic, vague, but often of a mighty fervor—toward a higher adaptation
to their role in humanity. The man of India loves to see the waist bend under
the weight of the breasts and the haunches, he likes long tapering forms and
the single wave of the muscles as a movement surges through the whole body. But
this hymn to the more tender forms of beauty is lost in the clamor of the
universe. At one and the same time he can adore Indra, the supreme being;
Brahma, the creator; Shiva, the destroyer; Krishna, the redeemer; Surya, the
light of day; Lakshmi, who is love; Sarvasti, who is science; and the horrible
Kali seated in putrefaction and the clotted blood of his victims. He can adore
the ten incarnations of Vishnu and the crowd of heroes and monsters of his
immense mythology and of the national epics, Ravana, Sougriva, Hanoumat, and
Ananta. He can invoke Rama, the incorruptible hero who would have led the
Greeks to the threshold of divinity. Rama is only one idol more in the
prodigious pantheon, an idol lost among the gods of fecundity and death. On his
walls he can bring together ferocity and indulgence, asceticism and lubricity,
fornications and apostleships; he can mingle obscenity and heroism. Heroism and
obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe than the
fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. Everything is on the same
plane. Why not let instinct spread out through nature with the indifference of
the elemental forces and, in its onrush, sweep away moralities and systems?
Social idealism is vain. Impassible eternity wears away the long effort of man.
The Indian artist has not the time to bring the human form to its realization.
Everything that it contains is contained as possibility. A prodigious life
animates it —an embryonic life, however, and one that seems condemned never to
choose between the confused solicitations of the energies of the will and the
energies of the senses. Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is
to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless. In the fury of
the senses or the immobility of contemplation, he must therefore descend
unresistingly into the chaos of the elements.

The
withdrawal of the Indian soul from preoccupation with morality, its pantheistic
confusion and disorder, cut it off almost constantly from the great abstract
constructions that characterize the aspiration of the ancient peoples of the
Occident. In India, the eye does not seize things in their ensemble until it
has taken in all their details. In Egypt, the desert, the horizon, and the
straight line of the river, as in Greece the winding bays, the transparent
waters, and the clear-cut crests of the hills, had made of man a metaphysician
or a philosopher, loving the rhythm or the sinuous continuity that he observed
in the universe; but here it required too many days to reach the mountains, the
rivers were too vast and too muddy for one to see to their depths, the forests
were too dense to permit the eye to take in at once the harmonious line of the
trees, the outline of their leaves, the true form of the creeping animals that
appear only in a flash, to flee from death or to inflict it. Man is surrounded
by an unpassable barrier of luxuriant life, the eye is dazzled by the
ceaselessly broken and mingled colors and lines of flowers that rain sparkling
dust, of vines, of beasts fantastically marked; one is caught up in the
feverish spirit of the germs of life and death that roll under the ocean of
leaves. The disorder of the material world of the Indian intoxicates his soul
and brings him to that pantheistic mysticism that every sensual being can feel
rising within him in supreme moments of love, when, through the embrace of the
woman who yields to him, he feels the confused and real presence of the
universe. In the architecture of India we must not seek that linear abstraction
which, by its continuity, expresses the visible rhythm of life; what is sought
and found is life itself, gathered up hastily and pressed pell-mell into form.
It is part of the quivering skin of the earth from which it was torn. The unity
of the world is expressed in it by the heaping up at one point in space of
everything that belongs to life, from the densely populated soil to the
solitude of the heavens, and from the motionless mountains to the roll of the
seas.